Letter to my only sister, long dead

If only you were alive, my only sister . . .

[In memory of my sister who died before all children in our family could see her]

Dear sister,

Receive greetings from your bro. Imagine I am now 23! It is 2011AD down here, and you could soon be celebrating your 27^th birthday had you been still amongst us. Now I am at a cyber café, having read and replied to my mail. I don’t know how I clicked the ‘Compose Mail’ button and decided to send this mail to you. mysister@heavenangels.com is the address I’m going to send it to, and, who knows, that Daemon might forget to send back the mail to me, informing me that the message couldn’t be sent.

Mum tells me you left them in a most brutal manner. I often imagine how bitter the fact was to them: young, inexperienced parents as they were. Their first born dying before her second birthday is a fact they must have taken really long to grapple with. Dad never talks much about it but I know it must have been such a trying time for him.

Your departure seemed like a spell; for you are the first and last daughter our family could ever see. Now, dear sister, you have five brothers, and not a sister to ‘screensave’. There are moments I feel like organising a demonstration, demanding for a sister from mum and dad. But I have come to realize that choosing the sex of one’s child is one hell of a delicate matter, operating between complex science and some unfathomable concepts involving God. Besides, my parents also seem to have given up the search. When the naughty bug bites me I usually think that they must have realized they were risking having a rugby sevens team in their search for a girl. They thus called it a day.

 I’m writing you this to let you know that I have been imagining how my life would have been with you around. I am sure it would have been total fun! Like ‘other boys’, we wouldn’t have been cooking, going to the river, mopping the house, washing our clothes and doing many other ‘feminine’ tasks that we are forced to do; tasks which my colleagues term effete. Lately, they have been advising me to get married. Their ridicule sometimes gets too much but I have learnt to live with it.

Ridicule aside, there are also moments I wish I could be like my friends with sisters.  Funny as it may sound, I have been fantasizing about chasing a dude from our compound. I am not joking, dear sister. Anybody with a sister does it here in the village. I can’t help thinking about catching a sleazeball unawares by our fence and whipping every bit of stupidity out of him, “for who told you to woo my sister? She’s not your type!” That is the line my friends say they use when performing that ‘demanding’ task.

It would even be fun keeping my fingers crossed, waiting to see you pregnant – before marriage of course. Again I’m serious. Here in the village, you never know the day or the hour when you will see somebody’s tummy bulging. Girls get pregnant by the hour and it is no longer news to see somebody’s daughter loaded. Whether it is lack of contraceptives of over-fertility of men around here I can’t tell. But let me ask you, dear sister: Would you also have had a bun in the oven so early? I bet I couldn’t let you. And if by accident that happened, for a million dollars I wouldn’t have let you abort. They do it here as if it is another call of nature. There were only short and long calls when you were here last. Now there are longer calls involving pregnancy termination.

I know, definitely, from here I will go to our family album. For the umpteenth time I will stare hard at that only photo you took with mum and dad. It is that photo in which you are innocently staring at the camera with our parents, very young then, holding your hands. I will look at your shy smile and smile in retrospect, with an assurance that, like all those who deride me, I ALSO HAVE A SISTER!

–Your loving bro, the second born; third born had you been alive.